This database houses lexical,
grammatical, and other data from languages spoken by hunter-gatherer groups and
their small-scale agrarian neighbors. It is designed to facilitate the
exploration of these data and to aid in phylogenetic research regarding the
languages under investigation. At present, the languages targeted are
predominantly from three major world regions: northwestern Australia,
northern Amazonia, and California and the Great Basin.

Hunter-gathering peoples are a tiny minority in today's
world, and their languages have tended to be understudied in comparison to
those spoken by agrarian and more urban populations. Hunting and gathering
subsistence strategies tend (with many exceptions) to correlate with other
demographic and social characteristics, such as small and relatively mobile
communities, egalitarian social structures, etc. A focused study of languages
spoken by hunter-gatherers and others along the hunting/gathering-agriculture spectrum
allows us to address questions relating to the relevance of subsistence pattern
and related social variables to processes of language contact and change.

Please note that this is a working
database and that information on some of the languages included is not yet complete.
Some of the judgments concerning lexical histories are best understood as working hypotheses,
which may be revised as historical work on these languages advances.